On a slightly smaller scale than the planned 'leccy infrastructure roll out Down Under, the British Government will this week announce it is planning to fork out £100m in order to test electric cars and vans in three cities.

The credit cruch has not - so far - affected the main makers of graphics chips. AMD, Intel and Nvidia all saw shipments rise between Q2 and Q3 this year, market watcher Jon Peddie Research claimed today.

Following on from its antipodean appearance at the Australian International Motor Show in Sydney, the Chevy Holden Volt is coming to Oz. And Australian power company AGL is going to put in charging infrastructure.

The government has canned plans for a 'national day' during which citizens of good old Blighty might celebrate their Britishness by tucking into a chicken tikka masala washed down with cheap tinned Oz lager while watching US TV imports on their Japanese-made TV.

"Listen up, friend. We take care of the community. We all protect each other. You wanna set up shop in this neighborhood, you're gonna need some protection, you know what I'm sayin'? I mean, you got a real nice business here, nice store, nice people. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it. Fire, robbery, these things happen all the time, but we can make sure they don't - at least to you. Let's say 30 per cent of your daily take? It's not in your best interest to say no to guys like us. It's bad for your health."

The gradual and metered improvement with the Ubuntu variant of Linux created and supported by commercial Linux distributor Canonical takes another step forward this week with the release of "Intrepid Ibex", which will be distributed as Ubuntu 8.10.

A Belgian judge who slapped a €2,500 per day fine on an ISP until it filtered its network for music copyright infringements has reversed the decision after music lawyers conceded it wasn't technically possible.

Poor Paris Hilton is the latest victim of the financial apocalypse which has ripped across our planet, with London clubs offering the talented amateur porn flick performer as little as £25k a pop to enhance their premises with her magnetic charms.

America has gone one better than Germany in the race to develop the world's most powerful submarine-launched robot aircraft. US arms giant Raytheon has announced a model which can be deployed at depth without modification to the submarine.

Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0, released this month for Windows and Mac, is a tipping point. This is the version that gives developers the features they have long been waiting for, including a cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework.

A report by Maltby Capital, the company created to acquire and run EMI, reveals that the British music giant is still spending money like a drunken sailor. A highlight of the out-of-control budget was £700,000 spent with just one London taxi firm.

Congressman John Dingell, chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, has joined the white space debate, asking the FCC to explain more about its tests and how it intends to police white spaces in the spectrum.

Just a few days after Opera Software patched critical vulnerabilities in its browser, researchers have identified another serious bug that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code on the machines of people running the most recent version of the software. Opera has vowed to fix the flaw soon.

In the wake of the launch of Ubuntu 8.10, Mark Shuttleworth - the founder of the Ubuntu project and the chief executive officer of Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu - hosted a conference call with the press and analyst community. And in that call, Shuttleworth, who is not afraid to shell out money for a good cause - such as the $20m he paid to be the second tourist in space, via a Russian Soyuz mission - made it clear that he is perfectly happy to fund Ubuntu until it gets on its own financial two feet.